Ricky Skaggs
By: Lori Smerilson Carson
The saying” family is everything” certainly holds true for bluegrass/country Singer/Songwriter/Musician Ricky Skaggs who started his career encouraged by his parents. At an extremely young age, he had the opportunity to display his extraordinary talents with the ‘Father of Bluegrass’ Bill Monroe and continued to work with many world renown musicians as he grew to make his mark in the music industry, even being dubbed as reviving roots music. Skaggs has several accolades including fifteen Grammy nominations stemming from recordings he made on his label appropriately named, Skaggs Family Records. He is still going strong today, and Florida fans will have the opportunity to see his newest show at the Lyric Theatre in Stuart on April 8th, and at the Clay County Agricultural Fair in Green Cove Springs on April 9th.
Catching up with Skaggs just prior to his tour, he revealed some details about the show that he and his band Kentucky Thunder (comprised of Baritone Vocalist/Guitarist Dennis Parker, Tenor Vocalist/Rhythm Guitarist Mike Rogers, Banjo Player Russ Carson, Lead Guitarist Justus Ross, Bassist Gavin Kelso and Fiddler Billy Contreras) will be performing, as well as divulging some facts about his music, his past, and what fans can look forward to.
SFL Music Magazine: What can fans look forward to with the show in Stuart on April 8th and in Green Cove Springs on the 9th?
Ricky Skaggs: Oh gosh, we’re really just looking forward to coming back to Stuart. I don’t know if we’ve played the other place or not. We usually get a Spring run in Florida which is always nice from the cold in Tennessee (he laughed). So, we’re always looking forward to getting down at least once a year, playing down in Florida. The Lyric Theatre is a great place to play, and my grandson’s name is Lyric. So, Pap always goes out and takes a picture and sends it to him and said, hey buddy, I’m at your theatre!
SFL Music Magazine: Little did he know, right?
Skaggs: That’s right.
SFL Music Magazine: You have many accolades. You have twelve number one hit singles. What inspires you when you write?
Skaggs: Oh goodness, just life. I don’t know. I love writing about sometimes people’s hurts, people’s joy, people’s struggles, but I write a lot of instrumentals too that have a lot of joy. You know, bluegrass music is so joyful. It’s hard to come and listen to bluegrass music and not start tapping your foot or tapping your toes or something moving in your body. It’s just music that, it doesn’t demand a reaction, but it certainly creates one. I love getting to touch people’s emotions with a lot of the songs that we do. We usually have a show pretty much planned out that we’re going to do that night, but sometimes someone from the audience may shout out a song that we know well enough that we’re not afraid to try. Something that we hadn’t done in ten years or five years or whatever, but it’s just fun to play. I love playing. I love writing. I love just seeing the audience. Seeing their reactions means a lot to us.
SFL Music Magazine: You started playing professionally at age seven with Flatt & Scruggs (Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs) on their T.V. show. What would you say sparked your interest in music at such a young age?
Skaggs: Well, I’m not sure. My dad and my mom, they were very instrumental at getting me started in music. My dad loved playing. He bought me a mandolin when I was five and stuck it in my bed when he came home from work early in the morning. He bought it at a little pawn shop for like five dollars. I grew to love that instrument so much you would have thought it cost a hundred thousand dollars or something. It just meant so much to me, but mother, she wrote songs, and she sang along with the radio and sang around the house. We sang at church on Sundays. So, we just grew up in a life of music. Like I said, my dad loved it and when he would come home from work, that was his joy was to come home and after supper or something like that, get to just play with the family. My mother, like I said, was a great singer. So, it was really based around family, and I think that’s why I love my band so much, Kentucky Thunder. Of course, being seventy years old and having a lot of younger people in my band. I used to be the youngest guy in the band and now I’m by years the oldest guy in the band. Being a band leader for a long time, that happens. Anyway, we just love to sing songs and write songs that we feel like people can identify with. It’s important I think, these days especially.
SFL Music Magazine: How did you get on that T.V. show? The story from your bio, it seemed like the whole town was behind you.
Skaggs: Well, like I said, I’ve been playing at five years old and Bill Monroe, the “father of bluegrass music” came to a little high school really close to where I grew up. This little town called Martha, Kentucky. I’d been listening to the radio and heard him on the radio but never saw him. Never saw a picture of him. You got to realize, we lived in the deep dark woods in Eastern Kentucky, in the mountains up there, so our Wi-Fi and iPhones did not work in the ‘60s (he laughed). So, it was really something else to go and watch him play and hear him for the first time. He was bigger than life. He looked like a giant to me. He was big in his structure anyway, but from a six-year-old perspective, God he was like a giant. But some of the neighbors in the hood, I tell people that folks in the audience that had heard me play at the grocery store with my dad, or heard me play at church with my mom and dad. Anyway, people started shouting out “let little Ricky Skaggs get up and sing a song” which was crazy! It was very embarrassing to me to have my name even spoken in front of Bill Monroe. He was a Grand Ole Opry star. That was as big as you could get back in those days, but finally after three or four different shout-outs in the audience, I think Mr. Monroe wanted to put an end to it. So, he called me up onstage which was kind of embarrassing. My mom and dad said, “go on up there.” I didn’t take my mandolin with me or anything. Gosh, we only went to see him. We didn’t go to play. So, I got up there. He kind of bent down a little bit and grabbed me by the arm and pulled me up onstage and asked me what I played. I told him I played the mandolin, and he chuckled, and he said, “well, what do you want to play?” I said, well, let’s do “Ruby”. “Ruby (Are You Mad)” was an Osborne Brothers song. It was kind of famous at that time. “Ruby are you mad at your man” which is something I didn’t really know about. I was too young to know what she was mad about. I loved the song though. So, he took his mandolin off and put it around me. Put it over my shoulder and over my head and kind of wrapped his boot string around the mandolin so it fit me. So, I played his mandolin and away we went on “Ruby”. After it was over, the crowd cheered and everything like that. He sent me back offstage and got back into his show again. So, I didn’t see him again for about ten years when I was with Ralph Stanley, I was sixteen. Well, I started with him when I was fifteen, but we saw him, and he remembered, and he thought I was older than what I told him that I was.
The way I got on the Flatt & Scruggs show was that my dad took me down to the Ryman (Auditorium) where the Grand Ole Opry was at that time. From Eastern Kentucky, we moved to Nashville and my dad had gotten work as a welder in the western part of Kentucky which was about a two, two and a half hour drive from here. So, we was at the Opry one night and I was just standing there. I had taken my mandolin with me, and I was just standing there kind of in the hallway, playing my mandolin and Earl Scruggs walked by and heard me play. I mean, it was a total God thing. I’m a man of faith and I don’t believe in accidents or incidents. I just believe in God winks or God moments. It was definitely something that even serves me all these years later. That one little thing. Earl loved what he heard and asked my dad to bring me down to audition for their television show, and so we went down to this audition and made it. Made the audition, and they set up a time when I could come and record the show. So, we did, and I never saw the show. When it came on, I was so embarrassed to see myself come out on the television screen that I ran in my bedroom and got under the bed. Never watched it. I listened to it, but I never watched it. Never saw it for gosh, I don’t know how many years it was that we found a copy of the show years and years later, and I actually sat down and watched it with my daughter and my son. My daughter was probably six or seven at the time which would have been the age that I was. It was pretty surreal to actually see that for the first time with my kids.
SFL Music Magazine: You’re a fifteen time Grammy winner, you’ve been awarded with eight CMA awards, eight ACM awards, two Dove awards as well as being inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame, Musicians Hall of Fame, National Fiddler Hall of Fame, GMA Gospel Music Hall of Fame, Kentucky Music Hall of Fame, and a member of the Grand Ole Opry. Just a couple of things, right?
Skaggs: Yeah.
SFL Music Magazine: What would you say is the key to your longevity and success?
Skaggs: Well, just respecting tradition. Honoring fathers of the music and mothers of the music that have come along and built stone on top of stone on top of stone on top of stone and just laid foundations for us. I think respect and honor gets you a long way. When you can honor others greater than yourself, I think it’s really important.That’s things that I try to teach young artists. Young musicians come along in my band because I have members in the band that’s quite a bit younger. So just really showing them how to honor people because a lot of times this generation doesn’t grow up with fathers and mothers that they really kind of take what they can and sometimes kids don’t really know how to respect and how to honor other people, but I think when someone comes into their life that teaches that and kind of models that in front of them, I think it makes an impression. So, I think longevity is, really the foundations of that, is kind of built on honor, respect and just really trying to be good at what you do. Keep working. Don’t just sit on your past achievements, but actually be out in the game. Just continue playing and working hard. Enjoying what you’ve done in the past, but try to not necessarily blaze new trails, but just stay in the lane that you were put in. I think that’s a big, big part of it right there, is not try to be in someone else’s lane because you’re getting in their way. Get in your own lane and stay there. There’s plenty of room in your lane (he laughed).
SFL Music Magazine: That’s great advice! In 2020 you received the National Medal of Arts for your contributions in American music history. You mentioned what you say to young musicians. Is there anything else you would recommend to a new musician?
Skaggs: I think just working hard on their instruments. Trying to get the sound great. We just have recently hired, probably over the last six months, recently hired a new guitar player, a new acoustic guitar player. The one that had been with us for about eight years really wanted to spend more time with his family. He lived in Utah. It was kind of hard to fly back and forth to get with the band and play with us, but we hired one of his students which was great. He was recommended by Jake Workman, the guy that had to leave the band. What I have really worked with him on is just trying to get his sound better. Just the sound of his instrument. A lot of times learning to play with a band, especially like Kentucky Thunder, I mean, these guys are like a recking ball. They’re such a tight band and it's no joke. It’s like man, you’ve graduated to the major league. It’s just not a farm team anymore. This is a major league, and not saying hey, you need to respect this. No, it’s not that at all. You try to look for humility in people before you hire them, and that was one of the things that really drew me to this new guy. His name is Justus Ross. Great name, but what drew me to him was his humility. He didn’t know it all. He didn’t act like he knew it all. He wasn’t trying to impress me in that, but I saw a lot of potential in his abilities to grow. I hired him the night that he came and auditioned. I basically hired him and said, hey, would you like to try out for three months? So, I think that a few guys in the band thought that man, he’s not as good. But I said, no and the guy that just left wasn’t as good as when I hired him either (he laughed). So, being a band leader, you’ve got to see potential in people. I’m sure that Duke Ellington, when he hired people, they weren’t the best musician in the world when he hired them. They probably was one of the best when they left, but he had a lot of great musicians come through his band and went on to be very famous musicians in their own right. Count Basie, the same way. I consider myself being a good band leader because I’ve had to do it since I was eighteen or nineteen years old. When I left Emmylou’s (Harris) band, I mean, I had bands before I went to her band in 1978. So, I had already been a band leader before that. I just think that it’s really important to look at people. Don’t judge them on where they are right now. Just dream into what they can be and dream with them. Encourage them. Find the good things that they do and build on that and not try to point out all the bad things.
SFL Music Magazine: Is there anything else you want to add about the show?
Skaggs: I know we’ll being doing some country hits that we’ve had through the years that people still remember and still like, but we’ll be doing a lot of instrumentals and really featuring the band. It’ll be a great, great time and like I said, coming back to the Lyric, it’s a great theatre. We always love playing there, so it’ll be a treat to come back and play there again. We’re looking forward to it.
